


Withnail's Ghost

by Skogkatt



Category: Withnail and I
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-21
Updated: 2009-12-21
Packaged: 2017-10-04 21:39:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/34393
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skogkatt/pseuds/Skogkatt
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A haunted Marwood reflects on his decision to leave.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Withnail's Ghost

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sebastienne](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sebastienne/gifts).



The ghost of Withnail is always with me. I see him in the wings whenever I have a soliloquy. He's there, pacing, sometimes shouting soundlessly, with his arms flying around in grand gestures. Always in that tattered coat, and his pants, saggy and greyed from the lack of laundering. Yet, he still looks marvellous, magnificent, as he always did in life. A spirit so large cannot look otherwise.

I'd thought I was leaving him, well and truly I did. That last two weeks was a frenzied build of guts and gumption. I'd never stood up for myself before, but once I got the notion to do so, it all came in one lumpy rush, like some nasty high from one of Danny's infernal cocktails. I knew I had to stop the drugs. That was the first thing. In niggling moments it frayed the edges of my endless stupor. I was constantly full of fear and panic. I was deteriorating, body and soul. The vast national nightmare visible in the papers had overtaken my head, so that my innermost thoughts were more troubling than the Daily Mail. This was a bad sign.

Of course Withnail had always been my crutch, if you can call something that repeatedly tramples you a crutch. He was always the brash, outspoken one. He gave voice to all the things I was too afraid to say I wanted. He didn't care what anyone thought of him. I still don't know if that was the money in his blood, or just his own personal spark. I think he might've been just as bad if he'd come from the streets. Would have conned everyone every way. Danny would have brought him round and I'd have found him in my bathtub, and then found myself paying for him to get high. I can see it all too clearly. No, there is no possible world in which I could be free of Withnail. I don't know why I ever thought there was.

That holiday, oh Christ, that holiday. It was what turned the tide for me. Two things, I can point to unequivocally. First, I remember distinctly sitting in that miserable kitchen, waiting for some meagre potatoes to be cooked through. Withnail had dug them up out of the front garden because we had no other food. Anyway, I was reading _Journey's End_ and I had the terrible, fascinating realisation that I was Raleigh. Withnail was Stanhope (insofar as anyone with that little sense of duty could be Stanhope, anyway), and here I'd been for years thinking glowing, hero worship thoughts about the bastard. The bastard, who in a few hours time (just as I finished reading the play, as it happened), would give me over wholesale to his monster of an uncle. It all washed over me, a bucket of ice water. People like Raleigh, like me, who worshipped at the wrong feet? Where did we end up? Dead in a fucking trench, that's where.

So that was one. The other was more immediate, less literary (though, I confess, all my reading at the time related back to this same problem). Monty, that wild, terrifying bugger, would not stop pursuing me, and I couldn't wipe that stupid smile off my face. It was a side effect of sheer horror, but I'm sure it looked like a come on to the old bastard. There was bed switching and all manner of "subtle" approaches, which ultimately led me to grin ever more sickeningly, and make the flimsiest excuses in the world for why I didn't want his prick in my arse. The whole time, inwardly, I was cursing Withnail. In the end (oh God, poor word choice), it was him that saved me, though. Sort of. I told Monty that we were in a permanent relationship, implied, in fact that we were in love with each other.

Monty, romantic fool that he was, swallowed that down like Withnail would a bottle of Scotch. He nattered on about love and loyalty, quoting poetry at me until 4 in the morning. But he didn't try to stick it to me, and for that I was grateful. The next morning he'd cleared out, leaving only an apology behind. Damned if I didn't feel bad for the old sot, though none of that disaster was truly my fault.

The thing with Monty's pursuit and subsequent apology, though, was that it opened my eyes. He was all too ready to believe that Withnail and I were romantically linked because damned if it didn't look that way even before he discovered us in the same bed that first night. I was attached to Withnail so strongly that one would be foolish to think it unromantic. I let him walk all over me. I constantly looked to him for decisions. His very breeding led to him have a better idea of how to get on in the world, or so I thought, and I acted accordingly. That whole business with Monty made me wonder, if I wasn't romantically attached to Withnail, if I wasn't caught up in eternal vows of love and loyalty, and if I didn't have any interest in buggery with that skinny, selfish, human sack of drugs and alcohol... well, then what exactly was I doing?

Withnail was jealous of my success, limited as it was. I tried to subdue all my reactions, when really I wanted to scream for joy and relief at having got auditions. I told him it would happen for him, and I tried to believe it, but it became increasingly harder as time went on. It wasn't that Withnail wasn't a brilliant actor. I knew he was. It was that he wouldn't play the game. He wouldn't kiss arse. Not his agent's, not the director's, no one's. He wasn't willing to work his way up; he scoffed at understudy roles, he refused to rein in his volatile temper, and he was never for a second anything remotely close to sober.

In the end, I had to go. It was self-preservation. I had come crashing down off the drugs, and I'd been offered a real part. I felt like Jean Des Esseintes at the end of _À rebours_. If I didn't go back to civilization, I would surely perish. And it hurt. It did. It was not easy to walk out of that den of filth, even knowing that if I stayed I would face madness, eviction, and sabotage at the hands of myself and my so-called friends. It hurt to push Withnail off as I walked to the station that day in the rain, even knowing that he'd destroy me if I gave him half a chance. But I kept a stiff upper lip, and looked ahead to a future that promised better things. Meaningful employment, birds, maybe even fame if I got lucky.

For a couple of months, it looked like I was on the right track. I was working, and slowly forgetting my nightmare past. Then I started seeing him. First it was just a glimpse of his reflection in a shop window I was passing, or the swirl of his coat in the crowd at King's Cross. Then it got worse. He invaded my dreams. I'd see him drinking lighter fuel, or rubbing himself with muscle embrocation. He looked pallid, deathly, but that was hardly a surprise. He always looked like that. But then I heard one night at a party that he'd done himself in.

"Some crazy bastard in Camden Town," said the host, laughing as if it were all a big joke. "Took it into his head that he might as well go out drinking, so he poured a bottle of wine into a shotgun barrel and then pulled the trigger while he drank it."

"What kind of wine?" someone asked. I was overcome with a sick sinking in my very bones, and my eyes lost focus.

"53 Margaux. Damned good stuff to be wasting like that if you ask me."

I heard the words only distantly, as though I were at the end of a long tunnel. It had to be Withnail. The whole scenario was too ostentatious to be anyone else.

"Excuse me," I mumbled. And then I staggered into the toilet to be sick. I could almost feel his bony hand clapping me on the back, and when I looked in the mirror, his shade was behind me, smirking. I've never had a moment's peace since.

Still, I carry on acting, because I don't know what else to do, and because I can tell he wants it. Every small piece of fame I scrounge, he claims as his own. I don't begrudge him that. He tells me in everything other than words that it's my fault he's dead. I as good as killed him when I left. I don't want to believe it, but I do. The evidence is too great against other, more comforting lies. Withnail's ghost is always with me.


End file.
